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Research Reports

Explore funded research, reports, and evaluations addressing some of education's most pressing issues. This special collection of literature is made possible through IssueLab, a service of Foundation Center. Sign up for updates to find out about new publications added to the collection.

Explore funded research, reports, and evaluations addressing some of education's most pressing issues. This special collection of literature is made possible through IssueLab, a service of Foundation Center. Sign up for updates to find out about new publications added to the collection.

This report describes the impacts of a performance-based scholarship program with a counseling component on academic success and persistence among low-income parents. Students who participated in the program, which was operated at two New Orleans-area colleges as part of MDRC's multisite Opening Doors demonstration, were more likely to stay in school, get higher grades, and earn more credits.

The members of Journey for Justice, are comprised of thousands of youth, parents, and other concerned citizens from com­munities of color across the United States. They wrote this report because they need the American people to know that the public education systems in our communities are dying. More accurately, they are being killed by an alliance of misguided, paternalistic "reformers," education profiteers, and those who seek to dismantle the institution of public education. Some are being killed quickly; others are still in the early stages. But it is, at this point, quite clear that there will soon be little to nothing left of our public school systems -- and many more like ours -- unless current trends are disrupted.

Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Illinois-Cook County-Chicago, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Michigan-Wayne County-Detroit, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Minnesota-Ramsey County-St. Paul, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Massachusetts-Suffolk County-Boston, North America-United States (Northeastern)-New Jersey-Essex County-Newark, North America-United States (Northeastern)-New Jersey-Hudson County-Jersey City, North America-United States (Northeastern)-New Jersey-Passaic County-Paterson, North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-New York County-New York City, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Allegheny County-Pittsburgh, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Philadelphia County-Philadelphia, North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington, North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans, North America-United States-Puerto Rico-Caguas

With support from MetLife Foundation, the Afterschool Alliance presents this compendium, containing a series of four issue briefs examining critical issues facing middle school youth, schools and communities, and the vital role afterschool programs play in addressing these issues. The four issue briefs featured in this publication address: the importance of aligning afterschool with the school day, bullying awareness and prevention, service-learning opportunities and literacy education. Each brief combines relevant statistics, comments from experts and community leaders, and examples of outstanding afterschool programs. The compendium also includes profiles of successful programs and a discussion of the MetLife Foundation Afterschool Innovator Award.

Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Illinois-Cook County-Chicago, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Adams County-Gettysburg, North America-United States (Southern)-District of Columbia-Washington, North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans, North America-United States (Western)-California-Alameda County-Oakland

A recent report from the Reason Foundation argues for significant changes in how public education is organized and delivered in large cities. The report argues that city schools should move toward a "portfolio" of schools model. In such a model, the district does not necessarily operate schools, but instead focuses on closing low-performing schools and opening new ones under the management of autonomous people or corporations. The report cites improvements in student achievement in New Orleans that have accompanied a substantial shift in the city towards charter and autonomous schools. However, the heavy reliance on New Orleans is a significant weakness in this report, as there are myriad reasons unrelated to the portfolio approach that likely explain some or all of the gains, including substantial population shift of low-income children post-Hurricane Katrina and a significant increase in resources. The findings from New Orleans are supplemented by examples from other cities, but these examples and other arguments throughout the report rest not on systematic research but instead on carefully selected examples intended to support a particular perspective.

Common enrollment systems designed to manage student enrollment across district and charter sectors introduce a host of governance challenges. City charter and district leaders realize the importance of cross-sector representation when deciding policies related to enrollment, such as the number of choices families should list or whether some students will have enrollment priority over others. The question of who will administer the enrollment process once these policy decisions are made can be highly controversial. Cities that don't attend to these management questions early on risk major political fights that can stall or derail progress on the effort.

There is little precedence, nor is there a ready-made legal framework, for coordinating enrollment across sectors; how these systems will be governed and operated must instead be resolved through the collaboration of agencies, many of which have histories of competition, mistrust, and hostility. In this issue brief, we draw from a series of interviews with local education leaders in Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., focusing on the governance issues that emerged as these three jurisdictions sought a cross-sector common enrollment system.

While some urban school systems have long had enrollment processes to manage choice for schools under their control, the expansion of charter schools presents a different and more complicated challenge for both parents and administrators. In many places, students no longer have a single "home district" in the traditional sense. Instead, they can now choose to enroll in the local school district or one of the city's charter schools. State charter laws give charter schools -- whether they are an independent local education agency or not -- authority over their enrollment processes; a charter school must conduct its process in a manner consistent with the law, typically a random lottery.

As charter schools grow in number, so does the number of separate enrollment systems operating across individual cities. In Denver, for example, a 2010 report showed that 60 separate enrollment systems operated in the city at the same time. Similar situations occurred in New Orleans and D.C. As individual selection processes grew to unmanageable levels in these cities, education and community leaders sought ways to rationalize and centralize student placement across an increasing number of school choices

This report looks deeply inside 17 schools that stand at the vanguard of the current revolution in teaching. It reveals the substantive ways in which these schools are providing their teachers with more time to reflect on, develop, and hone their craft, by very explicitly leveraging an expanded-time school schedule and calendar. These schools' expanded time (on average, they are in session almost 300 hours more per year than the national norm of 1,170 hours) affords not only more hours and days focused on classroom instruction, but also a full array of professional learning opportunities.

Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Midwestern)-Illinois-Cook County-Chicago, North America-United States (Midwestern)-Ohio-Cuyahoga County-Cleveland, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Connecticut-New Haven County-New Haven, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Massachusetts, North America-United States (Northeastern)-New Jersey-Union County-Elizabeth, North America-United States (Northeastern)-New York-Kings County-New York City (Brooklyn), North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Philadelphia County-Philadelphia, North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans, North America-United States (Southern)-Tennessee-Shelby County-Memphis, North America-United States (Southwestern)-Arizona-Maricopa County-Phoenix, North America-United States (Southwestern)-Texas-Harris County-Houston, North America-United States (Western)-California-San Diego County, North America-United States (Western)-Colorado-Denver County-Denver

Examines preliminary outcomes for student achievement, stakeholder support, recruitment and retention, and changes in school cultures; success factors; challenges; and the role of states and districts in implementation and financial sustainability.

Geographic Focus: North America-United States (Southwestern)-Arizona, North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana, North America-United States (Southern)-Louisiana-Orleans Parish-New Orleans, North America-United States (Southern)-North Carolina, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania, North America-United States (Northeastern)-Pennsylvania-Philadelphia County-Philadelphia, North America-United States (Southern)-South Carolina, North America-United States (Southwestern)-Texas, North America-United States (Southwestern)-Arizona-Pima County-Tucson